#WhyIAttendGHC 2016

The Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC) is the world’s largest conference celebrating women in computing. Year after year, an increasing number of people attend the gathering from all around the world. This year, the conference had an estimated 15,000 attendees, which is a stunning 30X growth from the GHC’s first year (1994). This was Twitter’s sixth year at the conference, and it was an exciting event full of learning, community, and inspiration. This event is important to us because Twitter is where inclusion lives, and attending GHC advanced our Talent, Culture, and External Engagement priorities.

We sent an incredible team of over 50 people to represent Twitter. We were a diverse group consisting of product managers, directors, engineers, data scientists, VPs, university and industry recruiting team members, engineering managers, our Inclusion & Diversity team, and our CEO @jack. We also brought with us 13 extraordinary students as part of the Twitter @WomEng Grace Hopper Fellowship Program. Through a series of workshops and events before and during the conference, these fellows spent time with @TwitterWomen members and Twitter executives.

Due to its success last year, we once again ran the #WhyIAttendGHC campaign to see what inspires people to attend the conference time and time again. This year, we saw over 450 Tweets with the hashtag, which was a 143% increase from last year. Here are some highlights:

Some of the Twitter events were:

• #TwitterInHouston: our kick-off event with Texas-themed foods, cookies showcasing custom emojis developed by our Employee Resource Groups, and impressive interactive experiences.
• #TwitterTeaTime: an intimate afternoon brunch with Jack Dorsey, Nandini Ramani, and Grace Kim.
• #TwitterAtGHC: we hosted a booth at the expo for all three days of the conference, where attendees could learn more about Twitter and what it’s like to work here. We had hundreds of visitors, especially while our executives (Jack Dorsey, Nandini Ramani, Grace Kim, Josh McFarland, and Jeffrey Siminoff) were at the booth.

#GHC16 was another huge success for the Twitter team. We met so many amazing people, strengthened bonds within our own team, and left the conference awed and inspired. This is #WhyIAttendGHC.